


Revolving This

by the_alchemist



Category: Henry VI - Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 2 - Shakespeare, Richard III - Shakespeare
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 15:46:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2197521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_alchemist/pseuds/the_alchemist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The women in Richard III form fascinating networks of enemies and uneasy allies - I extend that back in time to show how Margaret became - as Elizabeth calls her - "well-skilled in curses".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revolving This

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gehayi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gehayi/gifts).



> _O Fortuna_  
>  _velut luna_  
>  _statu variabilis,_  
>  _semper crescis_  
>  _aut decrescis;_  
>  _vita detestabilis_  
>  _nunc obdurat_  
>  _et tunc curat_  
>  _ludo mentis aciem,_  
>  _egestatem,_  
>  _potestatem_  
>  _dissolvit ut glaciem._

 

“What’s that?” Margaret pointed to the sigil on the harbour flag: three yellow legs joined at the thigh, on a field of red.

“It’s the Triskelion, m’lady,” said the Captain. “The ancient symbol of the Isle of Man.”

M’lady? But she did not want to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging the slight. Instead she stored it up with all the other insults and injuries, large and small. One day she would teach him – teach all of them – what it was to disrespect the Queen’s Grace. But for now ... “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know, m’lady.” But she continued frowning at him, as though expecting more. “It’s perhaps ... a sort of wheel?” he hazarded.

To Margaret it looked like a deformed miscarriage lying in its mothers blood. “Fortune’s wheel?” she said.

“Perhaps,” said the Captain. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to give the order to moor.”

She nodded curtly. Soon, she told herself, it would be time for Fortune’s wheel to turn again.

 

* * *

 

M’lady. Not long ago, Margaret had been a wife, a mother and a Queen. Now – by the world’s account at least – she was none of those. What was she then? An exile? Yes, though she had disobeyed the order to head back to her old friends in France, and had instead sailed westward to seek the counsel of an old enemy. And what else was she? Well, that was what she had come to find out.

“Oh, you mean Mad Nell,” said the Captain at last after having denied knowing anyone who matched the description of Eleanor Cobham. “Yes, yes. She lives on the west of the island. Ask anyone. Not that any man will drive you within a mile of the place, mind.”

In fact, the carter deposited her three miles from the farm, and she walked for almost an hour before seeing the first outbuildings, and a muscular dairymaid stomping through the long grass with two big pails of milk. She was older than Margaret, with a hard, weather-beaten face. “You!” Margaret called. “Girl!”

The woman turned and walked over to her, and put the pails down. “I expected you yesterday,” she said, looking Margaret in the eyes, as though she were an equal.

At once, Margaret slapped her, except she didn't, because the woman's face wasn't where it had been.

The woman laughed. “Oh, Margaret,” she said, “you haven't changed.”

Then Margaret recognised her voice, and an echo of the face that used to be … “Eleanor,” she said. “Eleanor Cobham.”

“The same,” said Eleanor. “And you come to me a petitioner, I know, though you have not yet learnt to play the role well.”

Margaret felt fury, but made herself lower her eyes. “Your pardon, my lady, for not recognising you.”

Eleanor did not hide her scorn. “Well,” she said. “I am sworn to refuse no girl who comes to me for teaching, and has the talent. Follow me to the house, and bring the milk.” She leant on ‘girl’ just a little.

Margaret hesitated for a moment. To obey an order was against her nature, but what Eleanor had to offer was too valuable to risk. She picked up the pails and followed, and the mud that already splattered her silk and velvet was joined by greasy milk stains.

 

* * *

 

Eleanor – or Mistress Nell as she now called herself – led Margaret into a huge kitchen, with one woman stirring a pot of pottage, another mixing herbs, and a younger girl plucking a pair of pigeons.

Margaret's arms ached with the effort of carrying the milk, but she didn’t show it.

“This is Meg,” said Mistress Nell. At first Margaret thought she was introducing one of the strangers, but then they began greeting _her_. “Good morrow, Meg,” said one, but she didn't understand the speech of the others, and supposed it was that of the Manxmen.

Margaret bristled like an angry cat. It was bad enough to submit to the Cobham woman, but to have a whole pack of kitchen slatterns call her … not even by her Christian name, but by an ugly, bastardised abbreviation. Yet she remained silent. She would learn what she had to learn, and then there would be ample revenge for all.

“The floor needs scrubbing,” said Mistress Nell. “Meg, you can do it.”

Margaret stared at her.

“Just ask one of the others if you don't know how,” said Mistress Nell. “And when you're done, ask them to send you to my study, and we can talk. She swept out, as majestic in her woollen kirtle as she had ever been in court attire.

Margaret continued to stare.

 

* * *

 

The study was a tower room, round and lit only by one little window. Mistress Nell sat at a table on which were strewn books, bones and what looked like alchemical apparatus. She gestured to a three-legged stool, but Margaret remained standing.

“Would you like to borrow some more suitable clothes?” Mistress Nell asked.

Margaret had scrubbed the floor, and her peach-coloured velvets were filthy and sodden. “I ask only so I know what to expect,” she said, “but will you ever cease humiliating me?”

“You must undergo suffering in order to obtain what you require,” said Mistress Nell.

“You enjoy it though,” said Margaret.

Mistress Nell smiled. “Of course I enjoy it,” she said. “Now, tell me what you want.”

“To hurt my enemies,” said Margaret simply. “To destroy them.”

“And why do you think I can teach you this?”

“You can speak to the spirits of the dead,” said Margaret. “You can raise devils from the deep to serve you.”

“That I can,” said Mistress Nell. “And none can do it better.”

“Show me,” said Margaret. “Teach me.” And she didn’t try to hide the hunger in her voice.

“That I can’t,” said Mistress Nell. “That, no-one could. You lack the power.” Margaret went to speak, but Mistress Nell held up her hand. “You lack the power to do what I do,” she repeated, “but you have power of your own. Come.”

What happened next, Margaret remembered more as a dream, or as a set of disjointed images, than as a series of events. The tiny underground room, smelling like a charnel house and lit by a sickly pale glow; Mistress Nell chanting in a language Margaret did not recognise; other women in torn white clothes; a noise like the scream of a cat. And the face. If there was a body too, Margaret didn’t remember it: the face was such that you couldn’t look at anything else, pale as it was, and dead, and weeping with gentle eyes so much like Henry’s.

Its voice was Edward’s voice, Edward the child, inconsolable and calling for his mother. She felt milk seeping from her breasts and soaking her shift, and she truly thought she would die with longing. This is what it said:

_Forbear to sleep the nights, and fast the days;_  
 _Compare dead happiness with living woe;_  
 _Think that thy loves were fairer than they were,_  
 _And they that slew them fouler than they are:_  
 _Bettering thy loss makes the bad causer worse:_  
 _Revolving this will teach thee how to curse._

The next thing Margaret knew, she was waking up on a straw pallet, with Mistress Nell standing above her.

“Do you remember?”asked Mistress Nell.

Margaret stared at her. It was as though her voice were something small and lost, something that she had to search inside herself to find. “Yes,” she said finally.

“And did you understand?”

“No,” she said.

“You are a Gueeder,” said Mistress Nell

“A gwee ...” But there was something familiar about the word, hearing it felt a little like coming home.

“A Gueeder. It’s a Gaelg word – the language of the Manxmen. It means something like ...” she considered for a moment. “Well-skilled in curses.”

Yes. Margaret knew at once that this was the truth, and she felt a surge of grim joy. _Forebear to sleep the nights and fast the days._ “I will go,” she said. “There is a forest here, is there not? I will be the devil’s anchoress.”

 

* * *

 

And so it was that one Spring day, in the Year of Our Lord 1472, the Lady Margaret, sometime Queen Consort of England and of France, Lady of Ireland, Princess of Naples, was led forth to begin her time of mediation and fasting.

The maidens Mistress Nell had appointed to accompany her spoke not a word as they led her a cave by the forest’s edge where she might abide, and showed her which leaves and roots she could eat.

But she did not eat, not for the first two days and nights. Other than a handful of brackish water at dawn and dusk, nothing passed her lips except for curses. At first the hunger pains in her belly were distracting, calling her away from her purpose; but then they drew her back. The last time she had fasted had been the days and weeks following the death of her Suffolk, and doing it again pulled back memories until the grief was fresh again, and _then_ blurred into _now_.

She remembered the messenger who brought news of his death, the streak of white in his hair, and the bag he carried, stained with blood. They had called her madwoman then, but dead and rotting as it was, how could his face not be a thing to cherish? And more still than dead Suffolk, the memory of him warm and sleepy in her bed fuelled her curses: her limbs tangled with his, the ache of desire and soaring release.

She cursed the man who killed him. She cursed those who had ordered his murder. She cursed them again and again: a thousand curses, a hundred thousand, but the curses were only movement of the lips and tongue, only sounds hanging in the air.

Then, after two days and nights, one of the curses burned in her throat: a tiny thing, but unlike anything she had felt before. _You are a Gueeder._ And Margaret savoured the foretaste of her power.

One day, as Spring was turning to Summer, Mistress Nell’s girls came and checked on her, bringing hard bread and bitter wine. They still did not speak, either in English or in Gaelg, or make any acknowledgment when Margaret nodded her thanks.

Summer curses, Margaret learned, felt different from Spring curses, as night curses did from those uttered in the hours of sunlight. Each day, each week, each month, she learned more about how much there was still to learn. She starved impatience out of herself, and when Winter came the last remnants froze away. She would bide her time: she would roll as Fortune’s wheel rolled, never trying to hinder or divert it. And each day it was against Suffolk’s enemies she cursed and prayed.

She did not notice the snowdrops and crocuses, the tiny leaf buds in the trees, the birdsong. But she did notice when the hard winter curses blossomed into fertile spring curses, and she felt the power rise in her blood like the sap in the trees.

 

* * *

 

On the first anniversary of Margaret’s sojourn, Mistress Nell came to visit her. They ate plain honeycakes and drank herbal possets, and although they exchanged few words, Margaret found human speech rang strangely in her ears. It was almost painful. That evening, after Mistress Nell had departed, Margaret watched a bird fly to its nest and feed a worm to its little ones, and understood that the time had come to remember her second grief, the more painful one, since with Edward part of herself and her future had died.

It was Edward as a baby she remembered first. The pale softness of his skin, the way he would gaze up at her and chuckle, the feeling of his lips against her breasts. A few days after her confinement, jealous of the wet nurse, she had stolen him away to her chambers and fed him with her own milk. Now that soft skin had rotted into the earth, his milky lips had shrivelled away, and there was no laughter, but only a skull’s grimace.

Then there was Edward the youth. Could a boy have two fathers? Margaret thought so. He had Suffolk’s valour and looks, but his voice and bearing was unmistakably that of a Prince. She relished seeing him each morning, observing the boy’s face slowly transform into that of a man. But now the boy was gone, and the man she would never see.

Fasting was easy now, it was remembering to eat that she found hard.

Edward. Clarence. Gloucester. Cecily. Rivers and Dorset. Elizabeth and her children. Hastings. She searched within herself for the words that would destroy them all.

 

* * *

 

At her yearly visit, Mistress Nell expressed surprised that Henry had been left until last. “He was never a match for you, my dear,” she said. “He was never much of a man.”

“He was a king,” said Margaret, “and to be in his presence was to be in the presence of God.”

The third year was different from the others. It wasn’t filled with memories of what Henry had done, but with a deep mourning for what he had _been_. He was a king, and only a queen could truly understand what that meant. His weakness of body and mind were nothing, and even those ... Margaret sometimes thought she had grown to love him as a man loves a woman, a protective love. But she had failed to protect him, and he, like the others, was dust.

Gloucester. Gloucester. Gloucester.

 

* * *

 

Her shift was a rag by the time she was done, and her hair felted together in great grey mats. Once, she had thought power was clad in velvet and cloth of gold, but now she knew better. She had learned to speak words that killed, to fill her body with rage, and to mould that rage into weapons.

“Goodbye,” said Mistress Nell. Both of them stood at the dockside, squinting against the wind, watching the sailors scurry around to moor the boat, newly arrived from England and set to return.

“Goodbye,” said Margaret. Mistress Nell turned to look at her, as though waiting for something. “And thank you,” she added. There was nothing grudging in her tone, but inside she vowed that the ‘thank you’ would be added to Eleanor’s debt.

Eleanor departed as the boat’s passengers began to disembark. Margaret didn’t turn around to watch her go. The first off were the Captain and a gaudily-dressed Englishman. Gentry, perhaps, or the younger son of a minor Lord.

“What’s that?” asked the Englishman, pointing to the flag.

But before the Captain could respond, Margaret interrupted. “It’s the triskellion,” she said. She wore one of Nell’s kirtles now, but she had not cut her hair, and the elflocks bulged beneath her coif. The Englishman stared. “It always moves forward, like fortune’s wheel, you see.”

“And why are the spokes three?” asked the Englishman. “Is it for the Trinity?”

Margaret shook her head. “It’s the three kinds of love,” she said. “The love of a woman for her lover, a mother for her son, and a queen for her king.”

The Englishman laughed. “And what do you know of kings and queens, hag?” he asked

“It’s nothing but women’s superstition, Milord,” said the Captain. “Come, you said you wished to try our oysters?”

Margaret watched them buy bowls of oysters from the woman in the docks, watched the Englishman clutch his throat, and watched the people crowd around to help. But she knew it was too late. She felt the muscles in her face bending into a smile. Fortune’s wheel had turned again. Clad in traces of her power, Margaret ascended the gangplank, the other passengers giving way, and the sailors touching their caps.


End file.
